PERSONAL accounts of 50 people who lived through the 1916 Easter Rising have been released by RTE. The audio and video footage, which have been sourced from RTÉ Archives, features men and women who took part in the event of Easter week, 1916.

Men and women who were members of the Irish Volunteers, the Citizen Army, Cumann na mBan, the British army, the Dublin Metropolitan Police, as well as members of the public, appear in the footage.

In a bid to connect the men and women and their memories to the streets and buildings where the events unfolded, RTÉ has also developed an interactive map that allows users to click on 30 locations and see or hear an individual describe an event they witnessed or took part in.

Among those featured are Louise Gavan Duffy, who describes how, on hearing the rising had begun she made her way to the GPO on Easter Monday and demanded to see Padraig Pearse; Min Ryan, the sweetheart of Seán MacDiarmada, who visited him while he was a prisoner in Kilmainham Gaol on the eve of his execution; and Albert Palmer, a British soldier who was among the reinforcements sent from England to quell the rising.

Other stories which feature include an account from Dick Cormac, who was a living in Church Street and who saw Sean Foster, a two-year-old child, being shot in his mother’s arms; and Michael Carey, a constable in the Dublin Metropolitan Police at Mountjoy, who was ordered to close all the local pubs and to take down the proclamations that had been posted in the area.

Christopher Brady printed the Proclamation in Liberty Hall and describes the challenges he faced in producing the document - "We were stuck for the letter E".